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I was watching the ABC news last night. And the bulletin reporter crossed to a reporter outside the Lakemba Mosque who starts giving a report about the meeting over Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly. Then the camera changes to showing the ground, flicks to the sky and the show cuts back to the studio with reported technical difficulties.

Were the reporters being harassed by people not wanting a news story outside the mosque? OR worse a terrorist assaulting the media?

No. Nothing quite so interesting. Reading the news today I find that the cameraman went on strike in the middle of the story. Packed up his camera and left.

So, one less thing you can blame people in Lakemba for.

References:

• ABC news floored by live cross wires (SMH, 27 October 2006)

Had the head fall off my shower today. How useful do you think the internet would be for finding the cost of a replacement? Not very.

I tried looking up prices on Hardware retailers web sites. No prices, not even a catalogue.

Starting with Miter10. I wondered why they web site wasn’t working[1], until I realised that it needed the www on the beginning to work[2] It amazes me how many web sites are setup this way. I don’t ses why they don’t have both resolve, or the non-www version just redirect to the www version. Web hosts should make it easier to find sites. not harder.

Back to the search for a rose.

On Mitre10 site I couldn’t find a catalog, unless you want to live outdoors[3]. But I want to live inside and have a shower, so I moved on to the site’s search facility.

Entering shower rose and clicking GO I got the following error:

CreateRecordset error ‘8004181d’

There is no catalog.

/search/includes/index_server.asp, line 52

So, as you can see, there is no catalogue on the Mitre10 site. They are a series of franchises, so maybe no common catalogue.

My next attempt was with the Bunnings site. Another site that doesn’t work without the www[4,5].

Mouse over OUR RANGE and the only thing in the drop down menu is Gift Cards. Surely they have more then this? They are a harware store not a gift shop.

Clicking OUR RANGE actually gets you a larger list of things to look up. Unfortunately nothing for the bathroom, only Gazebos[6]. Not that that matters really, all the catalogue sub-pages linked to display the following error:

Internal Server Error

We have encountered an internal server error. Please try again in a few minutes.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

If this error persists, please report the problem here

Please click to return to the bunnings home page

The Bunnings site’s search doesn’t give me any error messages. But it also doesn’t find any shower roses.

So I’m left with no idea the cost of a replacement shower rose. If only harware stores could get their act together and put up useful website. It seems that they are too dependant on you coming into the store.

References:

1. mitre10.com.au
2. www.mitre10.com.au
3. Let’s live outdoors
4. bunnings.com.au
5. www.bunnings.com.au
6. Something you won’t find in the D&D Monster Manual
7. Urban Dictionary - Gazebo

Hormel Foods, the producer of the canned pork product Spam is trying to stop the dilution of its product name. It doesn’t mind too much that “spam” has become a colloquial term referring to junk email. What it objects to is use of the word “spam” in naming commercial products.

The EU trademark office has rejected its application. Citing the high count of sites using the junk mail meaning in Google. The second site when I checked was “spam.com“, the spiced ham fan club. So its not like it doesn’t appear at all.

I suppose the moral of this story is trademark your product name ASAP.

• Spam-maker loses bid to trademark ’spam’ (SMH, 12 Oct 2006)

Do you ever wonder what a computer thinks of your web site? How does it perceive the relationship between tags? Probably not the sort of thing you do every day.

I found a Java Applet online that creates coloured graphs from the html of web pages. Not quite what computers see. More an artists interpretation. Interesting to see what how the structure of your site is interlinked.

A collection of graphs I have creaqted (click for a larger image):

The RPG Gateway main page

One of the larger categories I manage on RPG Gateway, People and Places : Conventions : US and Canada

This blog

The Links page on the TenguTech site

You can find the Java Applet online here at Websites as graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet